Priyanka tilts the balance
The initial response of the party’s rank and file and its supporters to her formal entry into politics has been euphoric. With her looks bringing back memories of her charismatic grandmother, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, she has long been a favourite of the party faithful.
For the first time, two All India Congress Committee general secretaries will now be in charge of UP. Priyanka will look after the eastern part and Madhya Pradesh leader Jyotiraditya Scindia the western part.
If UP were a separate country, with a population of 229 million it would be the world’s fifth largest, after China, India, the USA and Indonesia, although in terms of land area it would be in the 80th position.
UP has 80 seats in the 543-member Lok Sabha, the lower house of Parliament. The next most populous state, Maharashtra is a distant second with only 48 seats.
The Congress dominated the political scene in UP, a major battleground of the freedom struggle, from the time of Motilal Nehru, father of the first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru. He belonged to a Kashmiri family which had settled there a couple of centuries earlier.
The Nehru-Gandhi family’s hold on the state was rudely shaken when the people, rising like one man against the Emergency excesses, threw the party out lock, stock and barrel in the 1977 elections. They rejected even Indira Gandhi and her son and heir apparent Sanjay in that election and gave all the state’s Lok Sabha seats to the Janata Party, formed by the coming together of several opposition parties on the eve of the elections.
The Janata Party government, led by Morarji Desai, collapsed in just two years. In the election that followed, Indira Gandhi took back a majority of UP’s seats. On her assassination, her son Rajiv Gandhi, riding a sympathy wave, won all but two of the state’s seats.
Thereafter the Congress began to decline. It slid to the third place and then the fourth, as the Bharatiya Janata Party, the Bahujan Samaj Party and the Samajwadi Party took turns at the top. In the last Lok Sabha elections, the party fielded 66 candidates in the state but only two, Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi, won.
Priyanka has stepped into the political arena even as official agencies are investigating some land deals of her husband, Robert Vadra, who is a businessman.
She is not a novice in politics. Since 2004 she has been supervising the party’s campaign in the constituencies of her mother Sonia and Rahul. She is also known to have been involved in political decision-making in the family.
Priyanka and Scindia face an uphill task in UP. For 30 years, the Congress has been just a small player in the state and the party machinery is moribund.
Rahul Gandhi’s decision to devote special attention to UP has come in the wake of the exclusion of the Congress from the alliance the SP and the BSP have formed to take on the BJP in UP. They have decided to leave out Sonia’s Rae Bareli and Rahul’s Amethi constituencies and share the remaining 78 equally.
The SP and the BSP were obviously playing tit-for-tat. These parties, which are small players in Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh, had explored the possibility of a tie-up with the Congress, the main challenger of the BJP in these states, in the recent Assembly elections. Hopeful of winning on its own, the Congress did not accommodate them.
As it happened, the Congress failed to get a simple majority in Rajasthan and MP and had to take the support of the BSP and the SP to form the government.
The BJP had won 71 Lok Sabha seats from UP last tie. This was a quarter of its national tally of 282. The SP and the BSP together polled more votes than the BJP in that election and the combine is in a good position to prevent a repetition of the BJP’s 2014 runaway victory.
Rahul Gandhi’s plan is a game-spoiler. He presumably expects his move to force the SP’s Akhilesh Yadav and the BSP’s Mayawati to rethink on the exclusion of the Congress from the anti-BJP alliance. If they don’t, the BJP will be the gainer. Every additional vote Priyanka draws towards the Congress may make it so much easier for the BJP to prevail over the SP-BSP alliance. -- Gulf Today, Sharjah, January 29, 2019.
BRP Bhaskar
Congress President Rahul Gandhi has demonstrated his readiness to take bold steps to retrieve lost ground by inducting his sister, Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, as a party general secretary and putting her in charge of half of Uttar Pradesh, the country’s largest state.
The initial response of the party’s rank and file and its supporters to her formal entry into politics has been euphoric. With her looks bringing back memories of her charismatic grandmother, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, she has long been a favourite of the party faithful.
For the first time, two All India Congress Committee general secretaries will now be in charge of UP. Priyanka will look after the eastern part and Madhya Pradesh leader Jyotiraditya Scindia the western part.
If UP were a separate country, with a population of 229 million it would be the world’s fifth largest, after China, India, the USA and Indonesia, although in terms of land area it would be in the 80th position.
UP has 80 seats in the 543-member Lok Sabha, the lower house of Parliament. The next most populous state, Maharashtra is a distant second with only 48 seats.
The Congress dominated the political scene in UP, a major battleground of the freedom struggle, from the time of Motilal Nehru, father of the first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru. He belonged to a Kashmiri family which had settled there a couple of centuries earlier.
The Nehru-Gandhi family’s hold on the state was rudely shaken when the people, rising like one man against the Emergency excesses, threw the party out lock, stock and barrel in the 1977 elections. They rejected even Indira Gandhi and her son and heir apparent Sanjay in that election and gave all the state’s Lok Sabha seats to the Janata Party, formed by the coming together of several opposition parties on the eve of the elections.
The Janata Party government, led by Morarji Desai, collapsed in just two years. In the election that followed, Indira Gandhi took back a majority of UP’s seats. On her assassination, her son Rajiv Gandhi, riding a sympathy wave, won all but two of the state’s seats.
Thereafter the Congress began to decline. It slid to the third place and then the fourth, as the Bharatiya Janata Party, the Bahujan Samaj Party and the Samajwadi Party took turns at the top. In the last Lok Sabha elections, the party fielded 66 candidates in the state but only two, Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi, won.
Priyanka has stepped into the political arena even as official agencies are investigating some land deals of her husband, Robert Vadra, who is a businessman.
She is not a novice in politics. Since 2004 she has been supervising the party’s campaign in the constituencies of her mother Sonia and Rahul. She is also known to have been involved in political decision-making in the family.
Priyanka and Scindia face an uphill task in UP. For 30 years, the Congress has been just a small player in the state and the party machinery is moribund.
Rahul Gandhi’s decision to devote special attention to UP has come in the wake of the exclusion of the Congress from the alliance the SP and the BSP have formed to take on the BJP in UP. They have decided to leave out Sonia’s Rae Bareli and Rahul’s Amethi constituencies and share the remaining 78 equally.
The SP and the BSP were obviously playing tit-for-tat. These parties, which are small players in Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh, had explored the possibility of a tie-up with the Congress, the main challenger of the BJP in these states, in the recent Assembly elections. Hopeful of winning on its own, the Congress did not accommodate them.
As it happened, the Congress failed to get a simple majority in Rajasthan and MP and had to take the support of the BSP and the SP to form the government.
The BJP had won 71 Lok Sabha seats from UP last tie. This was a quarter of its national tally of 282. The SP and the BSP together polled more votes than the BJP in that election and the combine is in a good position to prevent a repetition of the BJP’s 2014 runaway victory.
Rahul Gandhi’s plan is a game-spoiler. He presumably expects his move to force the SP’s Akhilesh Yadav and the BSP’s Mayawati to rethink on the exclusion of the Congress from the anti-BJP alliance. If they don’t, the BJP will be the gainer. Every additional vote Priyanka draws towards the Congress may make it so much easier for the BJP to prevail over the SP-BSP alliance. -- Gulf Today, Sharjah, January 29, 2019.
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